The answer

How silly of me not to think of Mr Google when I posed my question, encouraging readers to guess when a particular comment was made and in connection with whom. Those who guessed before or instead of discussing the matter with Mr G. came up with interesting replies (though I am still trying to work out what this comment means: "1946, Hitler/Nazi Germany, presumably talking about Churchill?". That got me well and truly confused.

However, it is clear that unless one happens to know or confers with Mr G. it becomes very hard to work out as the parliamentary comment could have been made about HMG and, especially, about the Foreign Office (now Foreign and Commonwealth Office) at any time in the last 200 or 250 years, perhaps more, which ought to be something we should all consider with due seriousness. In other words, it is not the people who are there now who are the problem but the whole institution in general.

And the answer? It was Lord Charles Beresford MP, speaking in 1902 in a debate on the following motion [scroll down for Lord Charles's fascinating contribution]:

That a sum, not exceeding £35,150, be granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1903, for the salaries and expenses of the Department of His Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Now that I think of it, there has been an important change: Parliament no longer debates individual departments' budgets and, therefore, has no opportunity to criticize or analyze their performance. That, I can't help feeling, is a great shame.

Ignorance lurks behind these ridiculous analogies

One of the many things that annoy me is inapposite and ridiculous analogies between some event and some other past event. It does not matter from which side of the political divide the analogy comes, it is rarely illuminating and most often completely wrong. But almost every time the analogy serves to make present events bigger, more important and, if needs be, more horrific.

No, capping housing benefits in order that people should live where they can afford to rather than where they want to is not "tantamount to fascism", as I was told on a forum. Quite the opposite. Nor is it anything like the Final Solution, as Polly Toynbee opined, though, apparently, she was forced to apologize; nor is it anything like ethnic cleansing as our own Mayor the egregious Boris Johnson pointed out (he, too, was forced to back down but did so extremely ungraciously).

I was overjoyed to read an article by that highly admirable historian Michael Burleigh on the subject in the latest issue of Standpoint.

Why do so many people accept such analogies? They surely reflect a nation's psyche, even when the experience of one country (say Britain and France in the 1930s) is actually being incorporated into that of another, as has happened with fears of appeasement in the US.

Looking to the past is part of any nation's sense of identity, whether for lessons to avoid or stirring examples to pursue. Simon Schama and David Starkey have built careers as pundits out of what are at best tenuous analogies with the remoter past and our present and future. The grim, thuggish, bureaucratic reality of Labour is unnecessarily dignified by comparing it with machinations at the court of Henry VIII.

Historical analogies also provide us with a reassuringly manageable cognitive map or route through a chaotically frightening present. Although there are significant differences between, say, parochial Irish Republican terrorists and the global jihadists, some take comfort in the delusion that a peace process lurks behind every corner. Everything can be negotiated if reasonable men sit down and settle. If it can't, then the "spirit of the Blitz" will see us through, even though "then" enemy aliens and Nazi sympathisers were also quarantined in internment camps and prisons.

For that is surely another reason for historical analogies. Our country is so partially and poorly informed about foreign affairs, not least by the likes of John Simpson, that it needs to be mobilised around sentimentalised snippets of a past it also hardly knows, which on closer inspection was less sentimental about our enemies than we like to think.

It is not just foreign affairs we are poorly informed on and ignorant about (one could argue that such ignorance was always present) but history in general. Past events are seen as mere sound-bites with no knowledge attached. Therefore, it is easy to draw inappropriate analogies.

Half-right, anyway

It is difficult to know what to make of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the ubiquitous Muslim journalist, writer, pundit who is also a fairly ubiquitous left-wing journalist, writer and pundit. Most of the time she spouts predictable left-wing rubbish ideas and has expressed the view that Boris Johnson winning the mayoral election was the equivalent of a coup in City Hall. She has also been known to spout rubbish about the fear that the Muslim community allegedly lives with in this country as they are all targeted by the secret police or whatever.

Yet she has written consistently and at some risk to herself about the lamentable position of women in Muslim communities, has opposed the burqua and has expressed great anger at our own Taliban putting pressure on parents and schools to deprive children of music and the arts in general.

The reason I started musing about the lady is because I actually heard her address a rather motley audience at Leighton House, the splendid museum that had been Lord Leighton's home in West London today. It was the opening of the Nour Festival of Arts that is designed to showcase (or so they say) modern Arab and Middle Eastern art and culture. Given Lord Leighton's interest in his own version of the Near East, his collection of artefacts, his paintings and certain aspects of the house, this is actually entirely suitable. The old boy would have been rather pleased. (The Arab Hall above is one of the great attractions.)

Ms Alibhai Brown spoke precisely for the five minutes allotted to her, which impressed me enormously, used as I am to the endless wafflings of politicians. The first part of her short address was dedicated to the subject of the article I mentioned above: the terrible perversion of Islam that rejects the idea of music, art, beauty, any sensuality. It is not what she remembers from her childhood in East Africa and, I must add, it is not what one gathers from descriptions made by travellers to the Mughal, Ottoman or Persian Empires. Quite the opposite: these places were seen by Westerners as the homes of unimaginable richness of senses, be that smell, taste or music. For a Muslim woman to attack the Taliban, whether the one in Afghanistan or nearer home can be dangerous. One has to admire her for doing this.

Then she went into her know-nothing left-wing mode. She talked of her surprise that she obviously thought we should share that a "toff" like Lord Leighton, one of Boris Johnson's class as she helpfully explained, should be so interested and involved with the East.

He was not exactly a "toff" having been born into a middle class business family and receiving a peerage (the first given to an artist) for his achievements. Furthermore, if Ms Alibhai-Brown really is going to write that book about Exotic England she had better find out a little more about the number of English people, toffs and others, who travelled to the Near East, studied it, wrote about it, even painted it. As a matter of fact, Lord Leighton was not really one of them. He does not seem to have gone further east than Italy.

As it happens, Ms Alibhai-Brown expressed herself pleased and excited by the thought that there were all these various links between England and Muslim cultures so why she should get so many things wrong in a few sentences is a mystery.

But there is one thing she does not like, as she told us, and that is colonization, which did terrible things to "us", well the colonized. Odd then, that she did not mention another aspect of Muslim culture in East Africa and that is the great slave empires of Zanzibar and Sudan. No, since you ask, the slave traders were not British or even Europeans.

Perhaps one day even China's history will become known

Back in the days when Communist fellow traveller Owen Lattimore (here is a link to the FBI file and here is Wikipedia, which tries to put him in the best possible light) was professor then professor-emeritus of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds with many people horrified by the fact that he had had to leave his American position because of ... shock, horror ... McCarthyism, there were many people who repeated his ecstatic descriptions of the glories of Chinese Communism and the wonderful benefits that accrued to the people of that country.

It was easy to work out that Lattimore was talking poisonous rubbish - he had been just as guilty about the Soviet Union during and after his notorious trip to some of the worst camps in the Gulag at Magadan and Kolyma. He had defended the horrors of Stalinism and was, in the sixties and seventies, defending the horrors of Maoism.

Other supporters of Mao were newcomers to the field. But even to my young ears they sounded utterly wrong. The fact that the language and arguments they used about China, of which I knew little, were the same they had used about the Soviet Union, made them very suspect.

Time has moved on and many people have accepted, more or less, that Mao was the greatest mass murderer in a century that was replete with them. Not everyone has done so. Notoriously, one of President Obama's short-lived aides, Anita Dunn, told not so long ago an assembled audience that Mao Tse-tung was one of her favourite political thinkers (along with Mother Theresa).

Above all, the people of China are still being denied the truth about their own history. It is slowly coming out, at least in the West. Ronald Radosh writes on Pajamas Media about a book that ought to become as well known as all the ones about the Holocaust: Frank Dikötter's Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962.

Interestingly enough, the Independent has written about the book and its author.

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Mr Dikötter's next book will be on the Communist Party's bloody take-over of China after World War II.

Intellectual drift

Yesterday evening I attended the launch of Professor Jeremy Black's latest book, The Politics of World War Two, published by the Social Affairs Unit. [There appears to be no link yet. Professor Black is clearly far too prolific for the internet to keep up with him.]

In his introduction, Professor Black spoke of the differences between conservatives (though he is also a reasonably stalwart supporter of the party with a capital C) and the socialists. Without being anything like a socialist Professor Black expressed som sadness at the thought of the modern Labour Party's intellectual rudderlessness. The cause was that they had abandoned history. The party of Major Attlee and Ernie Bevin, he said, had a clear idea of British national history and traditions. Their understanding was not the same as that of people on the other side of the political spectrum but it was real, nonetheless. There is nothing like it in the Labour Party of today.

That is very true and it is what makes NuLab such a tiresome bunch of utter bores. The trouble is that Professor Black then proceeded to explain that conservatives were very different. To be fair, he did not say that the modern Conservative Party was different but there was a strong implication of it. That, I fear, is simply not true. NuCon, just like NuLab is intellectually rudderless with no understanding of its own or the country's history.

Of course, I am rather looking forward to reading the book. It has a long chapter about World War Two in subsequent history and perception.

The dishonesty is outrageous

I have just finished re-reading an excellent book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, called In Denial. The subtitle explains the subject well: “Historians, Communism and Espionage”.

Dealing with the dishonesty, refusal to accept evidence and sheer thuggishness of the historical establishment in the United States (and is it any different here?) when it comes to Communism and the activity of the CPUSA as well as that of various spies, the authors point out on a number of occasions the difference between the way Nazism and its agents are discussed from the positive spin that is consistently given both to Communism and its agents.

Their theory is that this is the outcome of the New Left “colonizing” academia in the seventies and wishing to use the subject to bring up new generations of radicals who want to continue the failed work of the likes of Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Whether this works outside academia, the media and, always, Hollywood is questionable but those are important parts of American life.

In the concluding chapter they refer to the eminent historian of Russia, Martin Malia, who wrote, referring to the victory of revisionism in academia and the consequent refusal to face up to the truth about Communism that “bluntness is presently a therapeutic necessity”.

Haynes and Klehr summed up in two longish paragraphs that are, nevertheless, worth quoting in full:

Far too much academic writing about communism, anticommunism and espionage is marked by dishonesty, evasion, special pleading and moral squalor. Like Holocaust deniers, some historians of American communism have evaded and avoided facing a pre-eminent evil – in this case the evil of Stalinism. Too many revisionists present a view of history in which they wrong side won the Cold War and in which American Communists and the CPUSA represent the forces of good and right in American history. Most new dissertations written in the field still reflect a benign view of communism, a loathing for anticommunism, and hostility toward America’s actions in the Cold War. Many American historians hold America to a moral standard from which they exempt the Soviet Union and practice a crude form of moral equivalence.

Like Holocaust deniers, too many revisionists deny the plain meaning of documents, invent fanciful benign explanations for damning evidence, and ignore witnesses and testimony that is inconvenient. In the face of clear and compelling evidence of Soviet espionage, they see nothing. When the bodies of more than a hundred former American Communists murdered by Stalin’s police are discovered in a mass grave in Karelia, they will not look. Confronted with documents and trails of evidence leading where they do not wish to go, they mutter darkly about conspiracies and forgeries and invent incidents for which there is not documentation. Some brazenly offer confident exegeses of documents they admit they have not seen or condemn books they admit they have not read. They confidently propose chronological impossibilities as probabilities and brazenly situate people in places they could not have been at times they could not have been there. It is not entirely clear how to classify such intellectual activity. But it is certainly not history.

Professors Klehr and Harvey are too kind. Such intellectual activity is to be classified as lies and propaganda.

Procrustes and the study of history

David Solway, the Canadian author and essayist, has an interesting posting on Pajamas Media about history being manipulated to suit modern prejudices. He calls it Procrustean history after the mythical robber and his famous bed.

I particularly liked his no-holds-barred description of President Obama's infamous and historically ignorant speech in Cairo:

It is replete with distortions, fabrications, lacunae, misconceptions, inaccuracies, lies, exaggerations, and outright historical fallacies. There is scarcely a passage without its resident howler.

Couldn't have put it better myself. In fact, I probably could not do so.

The only problem with the theory is that Procrusteanism has always been rife in the study of history. At any time there was a tendency to stretch historical studies or to chop bits off to suit the current mode of thinking. The difference is that it was rarely based on quite so little knowledge and quite so much wishful thinking.

See it if you can

It took two years for Andrzei Wajda's brilliant film "Katyn" to open in Britain and then only for a couple of weeks in a few "artsy" cinemas. Nor has there been much publicity about it, almost as if our arts establishment did not really want people to see this work. I wonder why that is.

Could it be the shocking scenes where Nazi and Soviet officers greet each other in a friendly fashion before discussing what to do with the Polish officers the Red Army had, quite illegally rounded up? Could it be the sight of the red star on the engine that pulls those appalling cattle wagons in which the Polish officers are being taken to their last journey?

Could it be the sequence about post-war Poland where "liberation" means a new occupation and the truth cannot be spoken? Or could it be a fear that open discussions might raise the thorny question as to why the West, specifically the British and American governments, colluded for many years with the Stalinist lie?

I have a longer review on the New Culture Forum. You might like to read it but, if you can, go and see the film; find out what happened.